Thirty years ago they said it and today they say it. Thirty years from now? Who knows.

The appeal is gut level, and the science mind boggling. Smashing atoms together the same way the sun does to create vast amounts of energy that is basically free — once we figure out how to do it. It’s like traditional PV solar, on steroids — instead of simply absorbing the sun’s rays with panels and thereby circumventing photosynthesis and combustion, we’re creating a sun on earth.

The number of start-up fusion energy companies seeking to bottle a star is growing, and the largest, the secretive Tri Alpha Energy in Foothill Ranch, is cracking open their windows to let in some light as they seek to take the next step, as I report in this story.

And the fish is already behind the eight ball because we humans have paved over and built on so much of its former habitat. The trout spawns up streams in Southern California that are no longer hospitable to it because, among other things, man-made dams block its path.

In the Santa Ana Mountains where those fish once swam, the dams are starting to be torn down. It’ll help. But if trout could pray, they’d probably be imploring the heavens to bring the same water and the same rain those living in the mountains so desperately need.

]]>https://aaronorlowski.com/2015/08/18/man-vs-trout-vs-drought/feed/014.08.16 man vs trout vs droughta.m.Nostalgia for abalone is the reason to bring them backhttps://aaronorlowski.com/2014/12/04/nostalgia-for-abalone-is-the-reason-to-bring-them-back/
https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/12/04/nostalgia-for-abalone-is-the-reason-to-bring-them-back/#respondThu, 04 Dec 2014 21:41:00 +0000http://aaronorlowski.com/?p=65It’s a tale all too common: it’s tastes good so we end up eating waaaaaaaay too much of it.

Except with abalone, the consequences weren’t just an expanding waistline and newly-punched holes in old belts. It was driving the species to near-extinction. Though once common, you’d be hard-pressed to find an abalone on the Southern California coast because, well, we ate them all.

But half a century ago, you’d be hard-pressed to not find an abalone. In some spots, you had to walk over abalone just to get to the water. Plucking them off rocks and grilling them on the beach was common. It’s an era old-time divers remember fondly.

And it’s an era that one Orange County environmentalist wants to bring back.

]]>https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/12/04/nostalgia-for-abalone-is-the-reason-to-bring-them-back/feed/014.12.01 abalonea.m.Solar’s time is nowhttps://aaronorlowski.com/2014/10/20/solars-time-is-now/
https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/10/20/solars-time-is-now/#respondMon, 20 Oct 2014 21:07:00 +0000http://aaronorlowski.com/?p=62With incentives the way they are, there’s not much reason to pass up on solar.

The federal tax credit is expiring and the crediting system for unused electricity is about to change. Sure, prices for the solar panels themselves will remain low, and financing options will remain numerous. Solar will remain viable for years to come, but incentives don’t get much better than this.

All perpetuate what is, actually, largely a myth that sharks commonly attack people.

And an attack at the Manhattan Beach Pier doesn’t help the sharks’ image. Maybe the fish should hire a PR firm to improve its reputation among swimmers and coast dwellers.

Or, we could just listen to the scientists, long distance swimmers and shark researchers who know them best. Because, in reality, we pose much more of a threat to the sharks than they do to us.

]]>https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/07/15/hire-those-sharks-a-pr-agent-because-attacks-arent-common-experts-say/feed/014.07.13 shark attacka.m.Stuck with the tab: L.A. County must clean up runoffhttps://aaronorlowski.com/2014/05/06/stuck-with-the-tab-l-a-county-must-clean-up-runoff/
https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/05/06/stuck-with-the-tab-l-a-county-must-clean-up-runoff/#respondTue, 06 May 2014 21:14:22 +0000http://aaronorlowski.com/?p=48Los Angeles County didn’t create the pollution problem, exactly, but now it must clean it up.

The runoff that flows from parking lots, industrial yards, driveways and just about everywhere else carries chemicals and contaminants that sicken swimmers in coastal waters.

Problem is, finding the source of those pollutants once they reach county drainage systems that carry it to the ocean is near impossible. But there is a way for the county to build drain systems that filter out pollution and prevents it from dirtying the water.

And now, with the Supreme Court upholding a circuit decision holding L.A. County liable for the pollution, the county will have to figure out some new designs.

That’s what environmentalists are counting on.

]]>https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/05/06/stuck-with-the-tab-l-a-county-must-clean-up-runoff/feed/014.05.05 LA County pollutiona.m.When kayaks and contaminants collidehttps://aaronorlowski.com/2014/03/12/when-kayaks-and-contaminants-collide/
https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/03/12/when-kayaks-and-contaminants-collide/#respondWed, 12 Mar 2014 02:09:28 +0000http://aaronorlowski.com/?p=39I spent about two months, on and off, reporting out my recent Long Beach Register story about the Los Angeles River.

I could have easily spent another couple months on it.

The story started simply enough: the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board had released its RECUR study (as government agencies are wont to do), this one about recreational uses on the River.

Initially, I was just going to use the study as a news hook to do a story on the L.A. River, which I’d been gunning to do for a while. I thought I’d see what kinds of recreation people could do upstream from Long Beach, and what limited opportunities Long Beach itself had. I’d look at kayaks vs. bike paths, and see if anything additional was coming to Long Beach.

It got so much more complicated than that.

I should have seen it coming. My first interview was with the agency that authored the RECUR study. At one point, the woman who spearheaded the study told me, “There was no ulterior motive there.” I passed over the quote, and didn’t think about it again until I was going through my notes a final time and saw it sitting there.

Because others, mostly in the environmental community, think there was an ulterior motive.

The agencies — such as sanitation districts and city governments in the floodplain — that originally asked for the study to be done are the same agencies that discharge water into the L.A. River. As the river currently stands, in-water recreation use is allowed, meaning water quality standards theoretically have to meet higher standards.

Environmental advocates worried that if the study found people weren’t actually doing in-water recreation, that use would be removed, and water quality standards could possibly be lowered.

This is all extrapolating. What might happen isn’t really a sure thing. Lowering water quality standards isn’t something anyone talks about. That’s part of the reason I could have reported this story out for another two months. Sure, environmental advocates are worried, but need they be? Sure, recreational uses and water quality standards are related, but to what degree?

And this doesn’t even touch on the engineering debacle that removing some of the L.A. River’s concrete would be. But that’s an almost unrelated issue.

Instead, it was the federal government who called it, intentionally or not, as my latest Long Beach Register story details. As funding has dried up for previously-earmarked federal projects, so has the cash to move the Long Beach breakwater study (technically, the East San Pedro Bay Ecosystem Restoration Study) from idea to reality.

That doesn’t mean it’s not still a touchy topic. Since I arrived in Long Beach — since I arrived in California, even — I haven’t found government and other officials this unwilling to talk about a story. Sure, I only got one refuse-to-comment (from the Port of Long Beach, which has a lot of stake, but deferred to city hall, which technically oversees the Port), but most all the others were reticent to say much, keeping their comments brief. The activists on either side, the surfers and Peninsula homeowners, were quite talkative, eager to get their opinions out there.

But city hall? The operators of the THUMS oil islands? The Port? The Army Corps? All avoided expressing strong opinions. Why? I can’t say for sure, but I can guess. The breakwater is a touchy topic. The debate on whether to alter it or leave it be isn’t going to go away anytime soon. And for those who answer to the public, taking sides can be dicey.

]]>https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/02/04/long-beach-breakwater-fight-takes-timeout/feed/014.02.03 breakwatera.m.Making Cambodia Town proud againhttps://aaronorlowski.com/2014/01/29/making-cambodia-town-proud-again/
https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/01/29/making-cambodia-town-proud-again/#respondWed, 29 Jan 2014 06:41:40 +0000http://aaronorlowski.com/?p=23It was an emotional refrain I heard several times while reporting my story profiling Long Beach’s Cambodia Town.

Pride.

Cambodia Town has, understandably, suffered something of a bad reputation. The working class neighborhood was the site of a gang violence in the 1990s, and the area around Anaheim Street between Atlantic Avenue and Junipero Avenue remains one of Long Beach’s more rundown areas. Many of the residents came to Long Beach and the United States from the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia during the 1970s, and many more are the sons and daughters of those victims of trauma.

It’s a lot of violence.

But Cambodia Town and Cambodia itself are so much more than that history. The Long Beach neighborhood is a diverse one with people of all backgrounds — Cambodian, Thai, Vietnamese, Latino, African American and (a few) white people. It’s one where people are pulling themselves up and making new things: new restaurants and new film festivals and new dance performances and new after school programs to get kids out of gangs.

And it’s a neighborhood filled with pride.

]]>https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/01/29/making-cambodia-town-proud-again/feed/013.01.05 Cambodia Towna.m.Long Beach woman sues cemetery for coyote attackhttps://aaronorlowski.com/2014/01/28/long-beach-woman-sues-cemetery-for-coyote-attack/
https://aaronorlowski.com/2014/01/28/long-beach-woman-sues-cemetery-for-coyote-attack/#respondTue, 28 Jan 2014 06:49:11 +0000http://aaronorlowski.com/?p=17Klarissa Barrera, a then-2-year-old child who suffered a coyote attack at Cypress cemetery in July, has a thin, white scar on her leg where the coyote bit her and dragged her away before her mother scared it off.

For that attack — and the emotional suffering she’s undergone since — Klarissa’s mother Michelle Luper is suing Forest Lawn Cemetery for negligence.

Such an attack is incredibly rare, but it’s the sort of incident that sticks in the minds of anti-coyote activists across Long Beach, LA and Orange County. Those folks want the coyotes controlled — trapped, killed, fenced off, somehow contained — but state and local officials and scientists say killing the native animals does little good.

Read my story on both the lawsuit and local agencies’ response to coyotes here.